Why an obsession with Big Tech is not progress

I have never owned a smartphone but my life doesn’t feel demonstrably worse as a result. I am not on Whatsapp; my friends tell me that it’s a time-sapping curse. From social-media-addicted teens to smouldering mountains of electronic waste, smartphones appear to be hastening our descent into dystopia in myriad ways. And it’s not just phones: the advent of AI heralds a future in which creative work is abolished, vast data centres consume ever more energy and water, and humanity might well be turned into paperclips (or so a thought experiment by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom on the single-mindedness of machine learning once suggested).

Yet, despite the ubiquitous anxieties about an impending technological apocalypse, being a Luddite still feels like a naive minority position. When people see me brandishing my “brick” of a mobile phone, they might assume that I’m being insufferably condescending to those with less willpower – but my refusal to update it is, in part, motivated by my own susceptibility to distraction.

One reason why it’s difficult to alter the course of technology’s onward march is a stubborn belief in automatic progress. We might have a degree of healthy scepticism towards the tech bros, suspecting that their ambitions to live for ever in pod cities on Mars are hubristic and far-fetched. Yet it’s hard not to retain an implicit faith – inherited from the Enlightenment – that not only is technology unstoppable but that it’s also always improving.

This assumption of linear progress can cause us to forget about what was actually much better in the past. From the mid-19th century onwards, UK travel retailer WHSmith ran a subscription library on train platforms; you could borrow a book from one station and return it at another. Residents of Victorian London enjoyed 12 mail deliveries a day. Take a stroll around the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibition at the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum and you’ll see a striking illustration of the sophistication of pre-modern artisanal cultures: a statuette of a woman’s head with individual strands of hair carved in glass; tiny turquoise faience frogs inlaid with gold; an elaborate collar made from turquoise and carnelian beads – all crafted more than 3,000 years ago. The screens that surround us serve to conceal historical ingenuity, so that we can comfort ourselves with the illusion that things are getting better all the time.

In The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, historian David Edgerton demonstrates that technological change often runs in reverse. Ship-breaking is an example of this “low-tech future” – the process has regressed from specialised docks in Taiwan to beaches in Bangladesh where barefoot workers use axes and hammers. Sound quality has decreased on our single wireless speakers. Software updates provide only a simulacrum of advancement. As Cory Doctorow argues in his recent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, the “development” of products and services is driven by market forces, not human desire.

It is a testament to our persistent faith in technological progress that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to three scholars for explaining “innovation-driven economic growth”. In fact, as economist Carl Benedikt Frey has argued, not only is the pace of innovation slowing around the world but the most advanced and technologically innovative countries are suffering from economic stagnation too.

The buzz around AI suggests that we are finally about to witness a genuine game-changer. As Edgerton observes, however, this kind of futurism is itself unoriginal. People have been hailing the coming of a fourth industrial revolution since the 1950s, when it was thought that automation would do away with both blue-and white-collar jobs; despite the excitement around 3D printing in the 1990s and 2000s, its main use now is in art schools. An MIT report has shown that 95 per cent of AI pilots in companies are failing and there are increasingly widespread warnings of a major market correction in 2026 or beyond.

If the public and media commentary around new technology tends to forget past instances of technological optimism, we are often reminded, conversely, that techno-pessimism is not new: Socrates denounced writing for implanting “forgetfulness” in our souls and medieval scholars fretted that the invention of the index would dispense with the need to read entire books. But the fact that those concerns recur does not mean that they aren’t valid: James Marriott of UK newspaper The Times recently reminded us that after the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, PISA scores – an international measure of the academic performance of 15-year-old students in reading, maths and science – began to decline.

There is a cognitive dissonance between the AI “revolution” that is perpetually around the corner and our everyday experience of technology, which remains obstinately dysfunctional – from my hours spent this week trying to connect a laptop to an external monitor to the unidentified items still languishing in the literal and metaphorical bagging area. Not only is new technology trashing the planet and ushering in a post-literate society, it is failing on its own terms too.

Resisting new technology feels futile. Whereas the advent of the internet in the 1990s was legitimised by utopian chatter about democratisation, the approaching AI revolution is announced with a grim realism; we are simply told to learn to live with it. Yet there is an ambiguity at the heart of this sense of inevitability: it’s not clear whether it refers to the implicit assumption that technology always moves forward or to the unstoppable power of those promoting it. It’s an important distinction.

This is related to the residual mystique of tech bros, even though the media now often pillories them – a niggling sense that their wealth and power are the consequences of their being geniuses ahead of the curve. Yet they appear to suffer the most catastrophic nightmares of us all, if their scramble to buy bunkers in New Zealand is anything to go by. And this pessimism serves to inoculate them against public critique, even as their greed brings about the end that they seem to fear.

State investment funds much of the innovation in the first place. Yet governments appear blinded by the hype, unable to exert what little powers they have to regulate Big Tech. As my ability to function without a phone illustrates, human requirements haven’t changed much over time. It’s important to interrogate our apparent need for the latest devices and to ask whether it’s necessity, compulsion or mere addiction. It is time to ask what progress means and who gets to define it. Can we dare to regard technology only as a means to an end? Let’s see what happens in 2026 – just don’t try and Whatsapp me with an update.

Read next: Used with consideration, smartphones can deepen our connection to the present